Lean & Profitable

Can a business save money using freelancers? If you really check out your sources a business can save money using freelancers. Where do you find the freelancers? Below is a list of where freelancers can be found. Always check out first anyone you want to use. Get samples and business references you can call or email. Make sure you clearly spell out what is needed in writing before hiring a freelancer so no communication errors occur. I have used freelancers in my business. I have also been a freelancer. It can be profitable on both sides.

1. Elance.com - so far the largest online marketplace for free lancers and service buyers
2. Aquent.com - offers marketing organizations a wide range of services including consulting, studio solutions, project management, and translation/localization.
3. Adveres.com - another cool marketplace for freelancers.
4. Bidradar - recently merged with governmentbids.com and published mostly government-owned jobs for freelancers.
5. CGI Lance - largest marketplace for CGI scripts.
6. CTITjobs.net - most projects are programming and web design and even technical support for IT-related problems.
7. Codelance.com - custom software development and webhosting for companies outsourcing offshore.
8. Coswap.com - offshore marketplace for web design jobs.
9. Design Quote - a reputable marketplace for graphic and design jobs.
10. Developreneurs.com - an online marketplace where buyers looking for web development services can receive bids from dozens of qualified service providers.
11. Ework.com -delivers three outsourced value-added services— integration and implementation for eWork Enterprise 5, business process consulting to streamline contingent workforce business processes, and a comprehensive workforce staffing management service.
12. Freelance Auction - almost all services are offered here.
13. Freelance Auction Network - is designed to bring affordable high quality services to small business owners and provide freelance contractors from around the world a better way to market their services.
14. Freelance.com - a good place for independent professionals, freelancers, and service buyers.
15. Freelance Writers - the best site for non-fiction writers.
16. Freelancefree.com - the first and best free freelance website.
17. Freelancewriting.com - another great freelance site exclusively for writers.
18. Freelancewebprojects.com - all services offered and requires all freelancing talents.
19. Freelanceseek.com - available in 7 major European languages.
20. Freelancewebprogramming.com - another freelance site for webmasters and programmers.
21. Getafreelancer - this is my favorite freelance site so far. I am a member of this site and having some decent customers in SEO and writing.
22. Guru.com - Use Guru.com’s free service to search for and find freelancers. Post your project. Get free quotes within hours. Outsource your contract work today.
23. Hirecoders.com - not only a marketplace but also a general classified for job seekers and employers.
24. Ifreelance.com - huge freelance site for talented people.
25. Listbid.com - a very simple freelance site but has a bigger population.
26. No Agencies Please - is a free freelance site concentrating on programming and design.
27. NUJ Freelance Directory - the biggest freelance job board in UK.
28. OutsourceToday.net- is the online market place where buyers can post their projects. Businesses and consultants such as freelance programmers, copywriters etc will bid for the work you outsource and you can select the best one that matches your requirement.
29. Projectlance.com – One of the webs busiest websites

A day of back-to-back meetings is exhausting and overwhelming. Running from meeting to meeting, you leave an inbox full of unanswered emails.
Stop the madness by insisting on 50-minute meetings. What can be done in 60 minutes can easily be done in 50 with some focus and discipline.
Defy the default in your calendar and send meeting requests that end 10 minutes before the hour. This will allow you, and everyone else, to take a quick break, check email, and restore some sanity to your day.
For more information see Harvard Business Publishing at http://view.ed4.net/v/37G0/JP5FR/QYE1TD/JESAE1/

Passionate employees produce better results. The best way to spark passion in your people is to demonstrate your own passion, but you needn’t be a cheerleader. Here are three ways to authentically show your enthusiasm and inspire others:
Focus on the positive. Employees know when a leader truly cares about a company or a project. Passionate leaders can’t help but talk about what’s working well and try to find ways to fix what isn’t.
Don’t ignore the negative. Passionate leaders aren’t all about sunny skies — they address negatives in a realistic way and help people solve problems.
Set high expectations. This doesn’t mean unattainable workloads. Passionate leaders should inspire and challenge people to do their best, without overloading them.

For more information see Harvard Business Press Review

Changing your organizational culture and influences are not an easy thing. Cultures are complicated systems created and influenced by processes, mechanisms, and leaders’ actions. So how do you begin changing something so complex?
Start by changing the stories that people tell. Stories are the fabric of a culture and communicate what a company is all about. Do something that represents the culture you want to create. For example, if you want to reduce a culture of perfectionism, admit your mistakes and openly share your failures. If you want to create a culture of communication, leave your Black Berry at your desk when you go to important meetings. If your actions deviate from the norm, you can be sure people will tell stories about them.
What does your culture of your office or business say about it is viewed by both employees and consumers.
This tip was adapted from “A Good Way to Change a Corporate Culture” by Peter Bregman.

The trick to achieving tangible cost savings is to actively define your targets and commit to executing the appropriate tasks required to achieve the savings. Each initiative should be written down on paper, each task should have an assigned responsibility, and always make frequent progress status checks can create great results.

Follow these steps to develop a company cost savings initiative with your CFO and management team.
Create and hand out a template to each department head and schedule a department head meeting to discuss their recommendations.
Document the specific cost savings initiatives and assign responsibility to each task.
Include the following in a spreadsheet template starting with recording the current monthly expenses being incurred, project the savings you can achieve, determine whether the savings is or can be ongoing, project the annual savings opportunity, establish a completion date, determine the manager responsible for driving each initiative, if you don’t want higher taxes report, have a comment section for future status meetings, and finally schedule regular status meetings to monitor progress of each task and continue to encourage the entire management team to help each other in these initiatives.
Any company can benefit by having an ongoing cost savings initiative program. If you have a senior manager driving the process and all managers buy in to the potential your results will be better.

Harvard Business Publication Suggests:
1. Know your employees’ priorities. Don’t wait for review time. Regularly ask your employees what they care most about. As a manager, you need to know what drives them.
2. Communicate company priorities. Tell employees what the company needs to achieve in the next week, month, and year. Be clear and consistent, and do this often.
3. Align interests to responsibilities. Now that both agendas are clear, try as much as possible to channel employees’ interests into relevant company priorities.

To be a successful business owner, manager, or employee you must reach high, think big, work hard. What are you doing in your business to meet your objectives. Are you allowing your employees to grow, while helping your business to grow? Do not forget to tell your employees if they are doing a good job that by doing this item can give incentives to employees to go the extra mile.

Fortune Magazine has listed ways to help deal with stress at work. When you or your employees are too stressed they do not perform as well. Low performance equals loss of income for the business.

1. Clearly articulate your expectations. “Managers are often unaware of how they are adding stress to people’s workday by being vague about what they want,” says Bright.

An example: A boss will announce, “Let’s have a meeting Friday to talk about cutting costs.” That sets the rumor mill abuzz (are more layoffs coming?) and leaves everyone uncertain about what, if anything, they can bring to the table.

“If you say instead, ‘Let’s have a meeting on Friday, and I’d like each person to bring two suggestions for how we can cut costs,’ that is a whole different message,” says Bright. “Just by being a little more specific, you let people know what’s expected and how they can succeed at it.”

2. At the end of each meeting, ask someone to sum up what’s been said and who is going to do what. “Knowing they may be called on to do the summing-up cuts down on people’s BlackBerry use during meetings,” says Bright. “But beyond that, too many meetings are just general discussions, where everybody rushes off at the end without a clear idea of what comes next.” No one can succeed at something if they don’t know what it is.

3. Put a cap on hours. “If you have someone who puts in 60 hours a week, then make that the limit,” says Bright. What good does that do? “In many offices, nothing is said about constantly increasing hours,” she explains. “So people just keep putting in longer and longer hours, not because they really have to, but because they are afraid not to.”

The result, as you may have noticed, is that staffers get exhausted and irritable, and the quality of their work takes a dive. By contrast, “if you let people know there is a limit, and you set that limit at the number of hours they’re already working, it makes an amazing difference.”

4. Schedule some downtime each week. “One of the things that has everyone so stressed is that they never get a chance to catch up,” says Bright. “If your email inbox is overflowing and your office is a mess because you haven’t had time to get organized, it makes that out-of-control feeling just that much worse.”

So try announcing that, say, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. on Mondays and Fridays is “get-it-done” time, during which no meetings will be held. Giving people permission to clear away the background noise of tasks left undone “can be an enormous stress reliever,” says Bright.

5. Help people set realistic priorities. “If you ask people for a list of their priorities, they usually have so many that it is obvious where their frustration is coming from,” Bright observes. “So you can help them set goals they can actually achieve. Again, it’s a way of creating successes and regaining some control.”

I saw this other blog today and thought it fits appropriately with respecting your employees? Your employees can make or break your business and how it is considered in the community or across the US.

Chief Brain Officer 17 Oct 2009 01:08 PM PDT Evolving Excellence
Kevin Meyer
Regular readers know that one of my pet peeves is with how most organizations think of their people.  Yep, just a pair of hands.
This is driven in large part by traditional accounting that keeps that pair of hands on the expense side of the P&L and the liability side of the balance sheet.  So what happens when managers at traditional organizations look at those traditional financial statements?  The big light bulb goes off and they start running around trying to reduce that expense.  They begin to dream up ideas to make everyone work harder so they can reduce the number of hands, move operations thousands of miles across oceans to try to find cheaper hands, and perhaps try to find temporary hands to avoid paying benefits.
Fortunately there are some enlightened organizations that think a little differently.  In effect they zoom out a bit and realize something: there’s a brain connected to those hands.  That brain holds knowledge and training, is creative, and can come up with ideas that both reduce other costs and expand the top line of the business.
Not an expense, not a liability.  An asset worthy of investment.
That is how some companies can add labor cost and improve profitability at the same time.  And why companies like Toyota use robots only in situations that are dangerous or too difficult for humans, not to automate simply to achieve efficiency.  It takes a long time to fill a suggestion box in a room full of robots. When most companies must comply with using traditional financial statements, and are scrutinized by investors and analysts steeped in traditional accounting and focused on short-term results, it takes guts to choose a different path.  But some do, and they are becoming the winners.  They are the ones that aren’t lauded for “repatriating jobs” back to the U.S… because they never left in the first place.  They are the ones experiencing a surge in profitable business as fuel prices and political instability wreak havoc on far-flung supply chains.  They are the ones capturing new markets due to the ability to change direction on a dime without having to worry about language barriers and massive amounts of inventory on container ships becoming obsolete.
Perhaps part of the problem is due to terminology.  We’ve evolved from thinking of people as “personnel” and having a “Personnel Department.”  Most organizations now call it the Human Resources Department.”  Some are a bit further down the path and think in terms of “talent” or “knowledge.”  But those terms still convey a sense of expense and liability.  A resource, not an opportunity.

If you are wondering why I am writing about cars the Toyota organization has been know for starting the main process for having quality while being lean financially. They have obviously changed in one area to save money that has endangered the life of the driver’s. How far is your organization willing to go to cut costs? Do you learn from your mistakes or do you ignore the mistakes? The public expects quality and cost efficiency that will be passed on to your clients or the public in general. See Toyota’s mistakes below and do not follow in their footsteps.
Toyota’s Inexcusable Failure

Posted: 29 Sep 2009 02:34 PM PDT

by BILL WADDELL, Evolving Excellence

Many of us in the lean community - all of us long admirers of Toyota and ardent proponents of the business and manufacturing model they spawned - have had to make excuses for Toyota and rationalize some of their failings recently. The latest one, however, demonstrates just how far they have slipped from the principles that propelled them to greatness.

3.8 million cars recalled due to floor mats, of all things, getting caught up in the accelerator. What makes it so inexcusable is that it is not the first time. “Toyota recalled 55,000 Camry and Lexus ES 350 models in 2007 because of complaints of unintended acceleration caused by the mats sticking under the accelerator pedal. The NHTSA said consumers continued to report instances of uncontrolled acceleration in Toyota models after that recall.”

So much for quality, and so much for continuous improvement and learning.